Waiting for a Final Resting Place; Friends Seek Proper Burial for a Former Tunnel Dweller

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: June 11, 1999

For 13 years, Jose Camacho lived in the cavernous dark of an abandoned Amtrak railroad tunnel under Riverside Park, part of a subterranean clan of homeless people who scavenged their existence from the city's leavings. He died last month at 54 in a sunny one-bedroom in the Bronx that he finally secured in 1996 through the kindness of strangers and a rare Government subsidy.

Now, death has made Mr. Camacho homeless again. Unless his decomposed body can be officially identified and money raised for a funeral, a city morgue will send him to a potter's field on Hart Island for an anonymous burial.

But in death, as in life, Mr. Camacho is not friendless. A city police detective moved by the story of his climb from the depths and a photographer who documented his tunnel shantytown are trying to give Mr. Camacho a grave of his own.

They have joined forces with the Coalition for the Homeless, the nonprofit agency that helped Mr. Camacho and other tunnel denizens win an unusual set of Federal housing subsidies in the mid-1990's, when Amtrak's reclamation of the rail line doomed their underground dwellings. Once again, the effort involves overcoming obstacles of poverty and paperwork to break through the isolation of the longtime homeless.

Though no one doubts that the body in the morgue is that of Mr. Camacho, who was disabled by heart disease, the city considers a photograph inadequate for formal identification. Many days had passed by the the time his death came to the notice of the superintendent of his building on College Avenue in Morrisania on May 25. Usually the city keeps an unclaimed body for no more than two weeks. But Floyd Coor, the police detective working on the case, said he prevailed on a friend at the morgue to wait a little longer.

Mr. Camacho, who was 16 when he followed his dreams to New York City from Puerto Rico, had no contact with relatives and fewer than a dozen telephone numbers in the address book found by the police in his lovingly decorated, meticulously kept apartment. Most of the numbers seemed to be out of date.

But one belonged to Margaret Morton, a photographer and associate professor of art at Cooper Union who had befriended Mr. Camacho while working on ''The Tunnel'' (Yale University Press, 1995), a book of her black-and-white photographs with text drawn from interviews with residents of the shadowy, two-mile stretch of unused rail line in Manhattan.

''For me, Jose was a symbol of the dignity of survival,'' said Ms. Morton, recalling her astonishment at the ordered domesticity inside the tiny plywood shack Mr. Camacho had built at the south end of the tunnel near 72d Street and the Hudson River. Dishes were neatly stacked on a tablecloth, his bed was made, and pictures hung on bright white walls, including a luminous detail from Seurat's ''Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.''

Just outside, in darkness occasionally pierced by a shaft of light from a distant air vent, Mr. Camacho cooked his meals on a campfire grill and showered under a coffee can with water he hauled and heated daily.

In the ''topside'' world, he had spent years in menial jobs, including mopping floors in a restaurant and loading trucks in the garment center for a textile factory. But the factory closed at the end of the 1970's, leaving him without money for rent, according to the account he gave Ms. Morton. Alcohol, sleep and the daily demands of making a home in a rat-infested tunnel now kept him going, he told her.

''He really didn't expect to have a life beyond the tunnel,'' Ms. Morton said, ''and when he did, he was overjoyed.''

The program that made it possible was established in response to another group of subterranean New Yorkers, an estimated 1,500 living in the subway system in tunnels, squalid utility rooms and narrow passageways between tracks.

In 1994, Henry Cisneros, then the Federal Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was taken on a subway tour by an advocate for the homeless. Horrified when a flashlight beam revealed one such encampment, Mr. Cisneros asked one of the inhabitants what it would take to get him out of the subway system. The man replied with a question of his own: ''Do you have an apartment for me?''

Within weeks, Mr. Cisneros had used an obscure emergency provision of Federal law to earmark 250 housing subsidy vouchers exclusively for subway dwellers. He also approved a $9 million grant for the program, the first created for such a specific group, saying it could be expanded if it were successful. In effect, Mr. Cisneros was using his discretion to jump subway dwellers to the head of the line for so-called Section 8 vouchers, which pay private landlords the difference between market rent and what a tenant in the program can pay.

But nine months later, when Ms. Morton alerted the Coalition for the Homeless to the plight of Amtrak tunnel dwellers, the organization discovered that only two of the special vouchers had been used. After contending that the tunnel homeless should also be eligible for the vouchers, the coalition discovered why the program had been languishing, said Mary Brosnahan, the executive director: cumbersome bureaucracy, complicated paperwork and mutual skepticism.

Many tunnel dwellers, fearful of the city's shelters, thought the offer of housing was too good to be true. Many city administrators seemed to think it was too hasty. They considered permanent housing for the homeless the last step in a process of rehabilitation for drug, alcohol and mental problems. Advocates for the homeless, by contrast, saw the voucher program as a chance to show that affordable housing, bolstered by support services, could come first.

Ms. Morton recalled a meeting in which officials from the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development insisted that the tunnel dwellers, dubbed ''The Mole People,'' were not ''housing-ready.'' Indignant, she showed them her book. ''These people have completely built a home, furnished it, with books on the night stand,'' she recalled telling city administrators. ''How could they not be housing-ready?''

Mr. Camacho was one of the first who applied for a voucher. ''He had this amazing mixture of an extremely firm handshake and very shy smile,'' Ms. Brosnahan said. ''There was this robustness of spirit to him.''

In the end, apartments were found for 20 of 23 tunnel households helped by the coalition, she said. All but 46 of the 250 vouchers are currently in use, according to Peter Ragone, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but there has been no follow-up study.

The program's history, Ms. Brosnahan said, illustrates why advocates for the homeless are frustrated by ''boutique programs'' created in the glare of publicity that do not lead to large-scale solutions.

Recent research by HUD found more poor people on waiting lists for all Government housing subsidies this year than last. In the recent strong economy, the HUD report said, rents have risen and the number of affordable units has dropped. Mr. Camacho's apartment, for example, is now likely to rent for more than the $732-a-month maximum allowed for a one-bedroom under the voucher program, according to Project Renewal, the nonprofit agency that helped him find it.

New York City transit police estimate that hundreds of homeless people still live in the subway tunnels, though they say the number is lower than it was in the mid-90's.

When Mr. Camacho was homeless, he was grateful for the tunnel, Ms. Morton said. He remained grateful for small things -- a cup of coffee, a pizza lunch, the holiday cards she sent him, which Detective Coor found in the apartment. It is because she remembers that gratitude that she keeps trying to get him a proper burial.

The city will reimburse a funeral home for about half of the cost of the funeral if it does not exceed $1,400, she said, but many funeral parlors demand that amount upfront. One exception in the Bronx offers a package for $750, including burial in New Jersey, in a ''shared grave,'' five people deep.

''That troubled me,'' said Ms. Morton, adding that she still hopes that Mr. Camacho's estranged family comes forward, even at this late date. He told her that he had been unable to reach his sons from a marriage that ended almost 20 years ago, she said.

''Here's this guy who came from virtually nothing who got his life back together,'' the detective said.

The Coalition for the Homeless is ready to contribute $500 toward the burial. ''Most people would have seen Jose as someone who was completely a lost cause,'' Ms. Brosnahan said. ''An apartment allowed him to live out his life in peace and dignity.''

Photos: The canvas-covered plywood shack, bottom photo, that Jose Camacho built in an abandoned tunnel and lived in for 13 years. Mr. Camacho had a kitchen, top, and bedroom, middle. Jose Camacho in the Bronx apartment he moved into in 1996 under a Federal housing program. The lawn chair and the Seurat print were from his tunnel home. ($;Margaret Morton)